Production names vs. final names

The demands for glyph names during the design process and at the end of the production line are different:

During the design process, glyph names should be logical, legible and descriptive – so it’s easy to find a particular glyph while working on a font, and it’s easy to guess what a glyph looks like (even when it’s still empty).

At the same time, glyph names in final OpenType fonts must obey certain rules in order to work correctly in all environments.

For example, in order to enable text search in PDFs, it is necessary that glyph names follow the Adobe Glyph List Specification. In practice, this means that any glyph which does not have a readable name in the AGLFN must be named with its unicode value: uniXXXX.